[00:27.560 --> 00:30.120]  As a reminder, at 6 o'clock we do have our closing ceremonies.
[00:30.220 --> 00:31.740]  We invite everyone to join us there.
[00:31.940 --> 00:32.860]  It's going to be a lot of fun.
[00:33.960 --> 00:35.480]  And on to our next speaker.
[00:36.920 --> 00:39.560]  The Internet remembers all, yet forgets yesterday.
[00:40.660 --> 00:45.380]  Instar Books wants to memorialize iconic events like Tumblr porn and Google Glass.
[00:46.700 --> 00:52.420]  How does one solicit and edit books that try to get to the truth when sources are ephemeral and unreliable?
[00:53.720 --> 00:56.460]  And how do you actually publish in the modern age?
[00:57.040 --> 00:58.900]  Here's a hint, it's a lot easier than you think.
[00:59.420 --> 01:02.840]  Please welcome Jeanne Thornton and Miracle Jones.
[01:07.270 --> 01:08.010]  Hello everybody.
[01:08.470 --> 01:09.450]  Oh my god, that's really loud.
[01:09.790 --> 01:09.910]  Wow.
[01:10.530 --> 01:10.930]  Amazing.
[01:11.530 --> 01:12.110]  Are we hot?
[01:12.270 --> 01:12.930]  Ah, incredible.
[01:13.430 --> 01:13.550]  Yeah.
[01:14.330 --> 01:20.430]  Okay, well let's jump right in because we want to leave lots of time for questions and to hear from you about what you remember of the Internet.
[01:20.950 --> 01:23.710]  But we'll start by talking a little bit about publishing.
[01:25.470 --> 01:26.650]  Does my mouse not work?
[01:28.370 --> 01:31.370]  Okay, I've hacked my mouse into working by turning it on.
[01:32.110 --> 01:33.430]  Okay, so first hack, first hack.
[01:33.750 --> 01:35.030]  Let's talk about how publishing works.
[01:36.250 --> 01:39.230]  So here's a common view of how publishers work with writers.
[01:39.570 --> 01:44.970]  That you sort of do work of a certain level of quality until like a meter is silently going off.
[01:44.970 --> 01:50.050]  And then one day this sort of angel descends to you saying like we note that you have written a correct thing.
[01:50.470 --> 01:53.570]  We're going to elevate it to the world as like a function of the quality of the writing, right?
[01:53.670 --> 01:55.990]  It's going to be this sort of like grandiose process.
[01:56.030 --> 01:56.770]  You've arrived.
[01:57.130 --> 01:59.490]  You've entered the halls of this like echelon of published.
[02:01.290 --> 02:02.490]  It does not work like this.
[02:03.450 --> 02:04.790]  But it does work...
[02:06.690 --> 02:12.670]  To explain a little bit how it works, we're going to talk a little bit about the relationship between the writer on the left and the reader on the right.
[02:13.950 --> 02:15.610]  So one day a writer gets an idea.
[02:18.150 --> 02:22.210]  The writer then decides to work on that idea and encode it in the form of a book.
[02:22.370 --> 02:29.030]  Taking this sort of harrowing experience and turning it into an object that other people can look at, relate to, and appreciate.
[02:30.550 --> 02:32.050]  The reader then encounters the book.
[02:32.130 --> 02:35.510]  In this case the writer is just sort of handing it to them in the form of this bound manuscript, right?
[02:36.790 --> 02:41.010]  They do this process of decoding the book and having their own personal experience with it.
[02:41.010 --> 02:42.550]  You're late at night.
[02:42.890 --> 02:44.650]  And then they are changed by the encounter.
[02:46.770 --> 02:49.730]  Sort of propagating this dreadful vision upon the world.
[02:50.930 --> 02:55.550]  Here's a picture of the complete circuit of writer and reader here.
[02:56.350 --> 02:59.710]  And publishing can intervene at this point most effectively.
[03:01.490 --> 03:05.210]  So what exactly do publishers do in order to intervene?
[03:05.370 --> 03:06.790]  How exactly can publishers help?
[03:08.410 --> 03:11.350]  We believe there are five jobs that publishers can do.
[03:13.030 --> 03:14.590]  One of them is production.
[03:15.290 --> 03:19.870]  Which is the work of taking the raw idea and turning it into something that resembles a book.
[03:19.970 --> 03:20.930]  Is appreciated as a book.
[03:21.070 --> 03:22.530]  Is something you would want to buy.
[03:22.690 --> 03:29.910]  If you were to, for example, come to the vendor table and someone is selling a sheaf of documents that are binder clipped together.
[03:29.910 --> 03:35.470]  Or, like, hands you, like, a wrinkled, stained, like, tube documents with coffee rings on it.
[03:35.550 --> 03:36.870]  And says, like, this is my book, right?
[03:37.430 --> 03:40.930]  You probably have, like, a low likelihood of reading that.
[03:41.110 --> 03:44.950]  There's a certain level of, like, not expecting that form for a book to take.
[03:45.290 --> 03:46.930]  That may make you less receptive to the book.
[03:47.030 --> 03:48.750]  May make you less likely to prioritize it.
[03:48.850 --> 03:52.410]  Like, a publisher can do something that's going to be physically durable.
[03:53.290 --> 03:54.010]  Perfect bound.
[03:55.090 --> 03:57.310]  It's just, even the name speaks to quality, right?
[03:57.750 --> 04:00.690]  Something that is replicable.
[04:00.850 --> 04:03.910]  There could be lots of copies, so you're more likely to encounter that specific book.
[04:04.570 --> 04:08.250]  Things that, if you're working digitally, interact with devices well.
[04:08.470 --> 04:12.410]  Like a book that is easy to load upon your Kobo or, like, any other device, right?
[04:13.190 --> 04:18.890]  Publishers can do these things to sort of, like, knowing the form the books are likely to take and to help put your book into that form.
[04:19.550 --> 04:22.050]  It's sort of the most obvious thing that a publisher will do for you.
[04:23.050 --> 04:26.130]  Another thing is to help you with the editorial process.
[04:26.630 --> 04:41.070]  Of taking that original idea, being another person in the room for the shaping of it, helping to figure out, like, there are elements of your vision that were not so clear to me that I think that I can, like, with two minds working together to try to articulate a process,
[04:41.270 --> 04:44.690]  may arrive at something that's more, like, readily appreciable by all.
[04:45.150 --> 04:48.490]  They could do things like fix errors in copying.
[04:48.910 --> 04:50.390]  Like, other things editors do, right?
[04:50.510 --> 04:51.110]  At this level.
[04:51.110 --> 05:01.450]  Yeah, in addition to just killing a book entirely, which is something useful sometimes that an editor does, which allows the reader or the writer to be free of it and to work on something else.
[05:01.790 --> 05:07.910]  You don't necessarily know, you know, you're beset by this demon that's causing you to write this book.
[05:07.930 --> 05:11.330]  And, you know, you need someone to tell you to banish that demon sometimes.
[05:11.490 --> 05:15.430]  And a good editor can just, you know, say this book doesn't work at all and move on.
[05:15.430 --> 05:19.310]  Which brings us to acquisition editing, which is another form of editorial, right?
[05:19.410 --> 05:21.950]  Which is, like, which books are published in the first place, right?
[05:22.430 --> 05:24.770]  Like, attempting to kill your book at that stage, right?
[05:24.870 --> 05:25.490]  Here we have...
[05:26.270 --> 05:31.650]  In drawing this, I was trying to think of, like, what is the one book that would be, like, unpleasant to pick?
[05:31.690 --> 05:34.210]  But actually, I think all these books I would want to publish, really.
[05:34.450 --> 05:38.350]  I think, like, if we're anthropomorphizing books, I would be intrigued by every one of them here.
[05:38.990 --> 05:51.450]  But basically deciding, like, what kinds of books, knowing your market as a publisher, and what sort of readers are likely to come to you, and what sort of books they're likely to enjoy, or what sort of ideas, or maybe, would be good to see in the world.
[05:51.570 --> 05:55.910]  Like, what sort of little devil's tower sculptures do you want to see people start to make?
[05:58.230 --> 05:59.030]  Other jobs.
[05:59.570 --> 05:59.970]  Marketing.
[06:01.010 --> 06:06.970]  This is where we see this person squinting at books while somebody else is handing an envelope of cash to a bookseller.
[06:07.690 --> 06:15.590]  This is about making sure that books are places people are likely to encounter them, such as a bookstore, such as a library, such as other, like...
[06:15.590 --> 06:31.370]  We know this one sub-distributor, Joe Beal, who works with Microcosm Books, who does, like, strange sales to, like, rock-selling boutiques, like, incense stores and things like that, and has, like, an exact curation of books that are likely to be found in those places by people who go there.
[06:32.390 --> 06:39.710]  So basically putting books in the path of readers who are likely to enjoy them, and working to maintain the relationships with those, like, channels of distribution.
[06:41.210 --> 06:43.150]  As distinct from publicity... Oh, no.
[06:43.530 --> 06:43.970]  How do I... No.
[06:44.150 --> 06:44.350]  Stop.
[06:44.550 --> 06:44.710]  Stop.
[06:46.870 --> 06:49.550]  Technology is another thing that we can't do.
[06:49.690 --> 06:50.090]  One second.
[06:50.590 --> 06:52.550]  Let's see if we can get this back on track.
[06:54.810 --> 06:55.290]  Yeah.
[06:55.290 --> 06:55.770]  Publicity.
[06:57.030 --> 07:00.670]  This is where we're sort of making people aware that the book exists in the first place.
[07:01.090 --> 07:08.290]  Again, making it likely that you know that you should even go to the store to seek it, as sort of the complementary option of marketing, maybe.
[07:10.250 --> 07:13.250]  A lot of people think those are the same thing, but they are, in fact, different.
[07:13.510 --> 07:13.870]  They are different.
[07:14.010 --> 07:17.050]  As anybody who works in publicity or marketing will tell you at great length.
[07:18.310 --> 07:18.950]  It's true.
[07:19.350 --> 07:28.510]  And here are operations, which is making sure that the organism of publishing can continue to sustain itself and continue to provide the preceding services.
[07:30.370 --> 07:31.730]  Publishing is these five jobs.
[07:32.270 --> 07:35.790]  Someone... If you have a publishing company, someone has to do each of these five things.
[07:37.830 --> 07:39.110]  It is nothing else.
[07:41.770 --> 07:46.150]  Basically, there's... And I think this is important to stress, because I think this is something you learn when you work in publishing.
[07:46.730 --> 07:49.910]  But it's not something that's apparent to you prior to working in publishing.
[07:50.170 --> 07:53.510]  There's this idea that, like, publishers are measures of quality.
[07:53.990 --> 07:58.230]  That publishers are people who confer something upon you other than these five jobs.
[07:58.730 --> 08:03.870]  Other than, like, that relationship where your publisher is essentially a reader who is in a position to do these five jobs.
[08:03.990 --> 08:06.730]  It's not like somebody who's, like, knows more about writing than you.
[08:06.850 --> 08:13.550]  Somebody who, like, knows more about, like, classical culture, who will, like, elevate you to a place that you yourself cannot do, right?
[08:13.550 --> 08:17.510]  If you can do all of these five jobs, you are essentially doing the same work as publishing, right?
[08:18.170 --> 08:23.930]  There are gradually... Of course, like, qualifications on that, like, social standing means things to people in the world.
[08:24.170 --> 08:25.790]  Like, there are economies of scale that could be done.
[08:25.890 --> 08:32.690]  But basically, like, a lot of the grandeur of publishing doesn't really relate to, like, what that value is being given between the writer and reader.
[08:32.690 --> 08:38.110]  Yeah, a good way to think about it is just, you know, it's kind of an inverse of the Hollywood system, even though they're conflated.
[08:38.110 --> 08:41.930]  Because the writers retain basically all of the rights when they publish a book.
[08:42.410 --> 08:45.270]  And they can end that contract at any time.
[08:45.930 --> 08:51.310]  They're choosing a publisher, even though it doesn't seem like that to the outside.
[08:51.810 --> 08:55.350]  So writers are out there trying to find the right publisher for a book.
[08:56.450 --> 09:00.830]  And, you know, the publisher has the right to say no, because you don't want to be just bound to something you can't do.
[09:01.010 --> 09:06.190]  But really, they are picking a publisher that they think will be able to help their book the most.
[09:06.650 --> 09:08.590]  Yeah, you're partnering with someone that's not like you're being...
[09:08.590 --> 09:14.790]  I think we have this idea that, like, because we all learned to write in school, that, like, your writing is being graded by the publisher.
[09:14.950 --> 09:15.190]  Yeah.
[09:15.450 --> 09:16.470]  And that is not correct.
[09:18.050 --> 09:19.010]  It is a partnership.
[09:20.190 --> 09:22.750]  So what sort of partners would Instar Books be?
[09:24.390 --> 09:26.090]  Yeah, so let's get into...
[09:26.090 --> 09:26.970]  So who are we?
[09:27.250 --> 09:30.030]  So we've been working together for 20 years now.
[09:30.590 --> 09:38.930]  We got started publishing zines in Austin at Staples, where we met each other in college.
[09:39.290 --> 09:40.230]  And CopyMax.
[09:40.410 --> 09:40.690]  And CopyMax.
[09:40.690 --> 09:41.710]  We had Carlos at CopyMax.
[09:41.850 --> 09:44.770]  It was one of our first operations in production.
[09:44.970 --> 09:59.050]  Yeah, we started publishing a zine called Your Cryogenic Tomorrow, which was just short stories that we hired coffee shops around town to carry our little, like, carts that we made out of junkyard parts.
[09:59.270 --> 10:03.190]  And then these would be our distro units that we would keep the zine in.
[10:03.330 --> 10:07.390]  And then we had little funnels in the back of them where people could put money if they wanted to.
[10:07.530 --> 10:11.930]  And then we would collect the coins as they rained down.
[10:11.930 --> 10:13.330]  They were often stolen.
[10:13.650 --> 10:14.010]  That's fine.
[10:14.170 --> 10:19.670]  I remember one time we had a little skeleton called Little Nell that had, like, the coin was, like, hidden behind Little Nell.
[10:19.750 --> 10:23.390]  And somebody took Little Nell out and took the, like, $2 bills that were back there.
[10:23.970 --> 10:29.290]  And, like, my dear business partner, Miracle Jones, like, wrote a letter that started, to the thief.
[10:30.070 --> 10:34.930]  If you choose to burgerize this distribution unit again, please leave us half.
[10:35.290 --> 10:35.770]  Yeah.
[10:36.110 --> 10:36.770]  It felt fair.
[10:38.190 --> 10:38.630]  Yeah.
[10:39.510 --> 10:42.510]  So you can see we have a lot of expertise in publishing, right?
[10:42.610 --> 10:47.790]  And we have both worked for different publishing, like, small presses.
[10:47.970 --> 10:50.630]  We sort of graduated from zines to working with, like...
[10:51.290 --> 10:54.190]  I worked with a place called Seven Stories Press for a number of years.
[10:54.790 --> 10:55.210]  And...
[10:55.650 --> 10:56.070]  Yeah.
[10:56.170 --> 10:59.250]  And then I worked for Or Books, which were...
[10:59.250 --> 11:03.750]  They're both kind of complimentary presses in New York, because their partners used to be...
[11:03.750 --> 11:09.670]  The people that run them used to be partners, and then they broke up on this falling out that's legendary in this small publishing world.
[11:09.910 --> 11:10.330]  Yeah.
[11:10.330 --> 11:18.570]  But we both worked at both places, and that's kind of what we learned what publishing was all about and what our various roles and what we were good at at these places.
[11:18.790 --> 11:22.830]  What would you say is a metaphor for, like, who Or Books and Seven Stories Press are to one another?
[11:22.830 --> 11:25.630]  I was thinking there's, like, a Lex Luthor and Superman vibe.
[11:26.070 --> 11:26.090]  Yeah.
[11:26.090 --> 11:27.030]  There's, like, a...
[11:27.030 --> 11:28.350]  They're both Lex Luthor.
[11:29.130 --> 11:29.950]  They're both Lex Luthor.
[11:29.950 --> 11:30.470]  That's true.
[11:30.690 --> 11:32.050]  There are many publishers.
[11:32.410 --> 11:35.510]  But they both published great things that we enjoyed working on.
[11:35.950 --> 11:49.290]  And in kind of an epic act of, you know, employee theft, we learned how to publish from them and then started our own company together about six years ago, seven years?
[11:49.450 --> 11:50.130]  Eight years ago.
[11:50.170 --> 11:50.610]  Eight years ago.
[11:50.610 --> 11:51.230]  In 2014.
[11:51.430 --> 11:51.910]  Wow, time flies.
[11:53.890 --> 11:54.250]  Yeah.
[11:54.990 --> 11:55.890]  And I guess we should talk...
[11:55.890 --> 11:56.570]  Oh, what is happening?
[11:56.670 --> 11:57.510]  Why does this keep happening?
[12:00.950 --> 12:01.310]  Ah.
[12:01.650 --> 12:02.010]  Teasers.
[12:02.370 --> 12:02.730]  Sorry.
[12:03.230 --> 12:04.710]  I don't think we'll be showing up on the screen.
[12:04.790 --> 12:05.370]  Okay, if...
[12:05.370 --> 12:12.850]  So we have our sort of no-overhead model of publishing that evolved from this, which originally was part of...
[12:13.250 --> 12:18.910]  Oh, our books took care of some of these things for us, and then we gradually sort of, like, learning to walk, took on more and more of these jobs ourselves.
[12:18.910 --> 12:21.190]  Here's our mix of how we answer those five jobs.
[12:22.450 --> 12:23.550]  No, don't.
[12:23.890 --> 12:24.230]  Go ahead.
[12:24.790 --> 12:26.430]  Okay, so...
[12:26.430 --> 12:27.190]  Editorial.
[12:27.410 --> 12:31.890]  We both have distinct ideas about books, but a very well-defined publishing program.
[12:32.370 --> 12:37.270]  If we find a book that fits in with that program in a way that's, like, pretty codified, as you'll see on the next slide, right?
[12:37.610 --> 12:39.230]  And that both of us agree is good.
[12:39.770 --> 12:44.050]  Like, our ideas of what is good are distinct enough that if we agree on something...
[12:44.510 --> 12:44.830]  Yeah.
[12:45.170 --> 12:45.810]  It is likely good.
[12:46.230 --> 12:47.870]  It is likely, like, others will like it too, right?
[12:49.530 --> 12:49.850]  Production.
[12:50.190 --> 12:51.750]  We work entirely in-house.
[12:51.970 --> 12:53.910]  This is where previous experience comes into play.
[12:54.010 --> 13:04.650]  Like, in the course of doing this, we had to learn to make e-books, we had to learn to make physical books, design files, how to work with printers, how to set up cover files, and all of the... like, font management and all these different skills.
[13:04.830 --> 13:08.450]  That actually saves us an absurd amount of money and makes our practices possible at all.
[13:09.190 --> 13:13.230]  Um, just because we don't have to go to vendors for the things that publishers tend to go to vendors for.
[13:13.670 --> 13:16.130]  And that actually are not that much mark if you know how to do them, right?
[13:16.470 --> 13:25.650]  Which leaves us, basically, the main thing we spend money on is, like, very good covers, um, which a lot of people just can't afford because you need to, like, design the book rather than design the exterior.
[13:26.230 --> 13:31.490]  Yeah, if you're gonna spend any money on anything in the book publishing process, it should be on a good cover.
[13:31.630 --> 13:33.450]  And I think people do the opposite, usually.
[13:33.670 --> 13:36.450]  They're like, we'll spend everything and then they have a terrible cover.
[13:36.450 --> 13:38.070]  But that's the only thing that matters, really.
[13:38.230 --> 13:39.730]  That's all you're doing at the end of the day.
[13:40.090 --> 13:40.230]  Mm-hmm.
[13:40.470 --> 13:43.090]  We are told not to judge a book by its cover because we all do.
[13:45.030 --> 13:45.430]  Okay.
[13:45.730 --> 13:51.090]  Marketing, we sell primarily direct, which is also important because it gives us an income stream to finance all of these.
[13:51.330 --> 13:59.670]  Um, this is actually something that most publishers do not do, is do not sell e-books directly, which is a deep mistake if you are planning to start your own publishing operation.
[13:59.670 --> 14:13.590]  You need to keep distribution of your e-books because that is free money for you whenever anybody buys a book, which is what, like, every month we pay our host, or not our hosting services, but our, um, what do you call, like, big commerce?
[14:13.810 --> 14:14.770]  An e-commerce platform.
[14:14.990 --> 14:21.010]  Our e-commerce, or e-commerce services, um, through, I think, exclusively through that, right?
[14:21.170 --> 14:24.290]  And then, like, sort of printing books and distributing them is something that's much easier.
[14:24.590 --> 14:29.870]  We also do work with a distributor to get books into stores and try to build relationships with those stores over time.
[14:30.010 --> 14:32.970]  That is actually something we didn't do at first and ended up becoming very vital.
[14:33.470 --> 14:40.810]  Um, because it's just, people are not necessarily willing to give you the right to publish their book if you can't guarantee them it will at least be in some bookstores.
[14:41.470 --> 14:47.250]  Um, publishers we have worked with in the path don't do this, and it's actually very bad when you've published a book and you can't buy it anywhere.
[14:47.510 --> 14:48.550]  It makes you crazy.
[14:48.770 --> 14:49.730]  You shouldn't do that.
[14:50.650 --> 14:51.670]  Um, business.
[14:51.670 --> 14:59.190]  This is the most sinister bullet point in this presentation, which is that we pay ourselves for the above jobs primarily with equity rather than cash.
[14:59.430 --> 15:01.390]  Is this legal under the 13th Amendment?
[15:01.730 --> 15:02.410]  Who can say?
[15:04.170 --> 15:09.410]  Um, we primarily fund our projects through crowdfunding rather than seeking seed investment.
[15:09.610 --> 15:14.630]  And again, we do sell our digital copies direct, so we have, like, a regular cash flow plus, like, a quarterly check from the distributor.
[15:15.710 --> 15:19.570]  Um, there are probably, this is probably something we shouldn't do.
[15:20.270 --> 15:24.390]  The, uh, equity instead of cash part, we are looking at various models around it.
[15:24.530 --> 15:26.830]  I think that it is important to us to keep the equity in the business.
[15:27.050 --> 15:40.090]  Um, but I think there, if you are planning to do other models like this, there are certainly ways that you could think of a co-op model, you could think of other things that would, like, perhaps dilute the publishing program but would allow it to be more sustainable in some ways and bring more people into it.
[15:40.170 --> 15:43.690]  Yeah, and at this point, we should probably say that we started with nothing.
[15:43.970 --> 15:46.630]  We, we began this publishing company with literally no dollars.
[15:46.630 --> 15:55.710]  What we made, the way we made our initial investment was we had our own books that we then published and then put the money back from, into the company from that.
[15:56.150 --> 15:56.290]  Yeah.
[15:56.290 --> 16:07.590]  So, and we had, you know, um, we had, uh, I would say, a little, like, more expertise because we'd worked in publishing than somebody else starting out, so we knew how to produce books and we knew how to make e-books.
[16:07.590 --> 16:12.630]  So, I guess that's a form of investment, but as far as the money that went into it, there's, there was nothing.
[16:12.910 --> 16:14.590]  So, that was very important to us.
[16:14.710 --> 16:18.270]  So, we, we, that means that we are a profitable publishing company, which is rare.
[16:18.770 --> 16:18.870]  Yeah.
[16:19.030 --> 16:23.170]  Um, and we do try to, uh, we do try to make money off of every book.
[16:23.310 --> 16:28.470]  We try to make a plan for each book and not go all in on something, just on speculation.
[16:28.470 --> 16:29.050]  Mm-hmm.
[16:29.050 --> 16:36.590]  And that does help us pay our bills that way because each book is, is something that we are, we don't get mad at books when they fail, I guess.
[16:36.730 --> 16:45.030]  We can, we can, they're all kind of benevolent to us as opposed to, um, this really casino style version that most publishing companies operate on.
[16:45.390 --> 16:45.550]  Mm-hmm.
[16:46.290 --> 16:52.010]  There's a Roberto Colasso quote that, like, publishing is invented to keep, like, great men of fortune out of casinos.
[16:52.430 --> 16:52.450]  Yeah.
[16:52.610 --> 17:05.290]  It's like, um, okay, and publicity we solve by actually contracting because this is the thing we both of us are really bad at is, like, telling anybody what we're up to is just, like, for personal reasons, isn't something we can either, either of us can really do very well.
[17:05.430 --> 17:17.370]  So, I think, like, we contract out to a publicist who is responsible for connecting our books with, um, newspapers, magazines, et cetera, and is actually the only person other than the cover artist who really, and the authors also, as we do, we do, um,
[17:17.510 --> 17:21.510]  earn out royalties pretty quickly with this model, who makes money off of the project right now.
[17:21.750 --> 17:23.270]  Yeah, that's something else we'd do different.
[17:23.410 --> 17:25.190]  We pay very small advances.
[17:25.710 --> 17:25.830]  Mm-hmm.
[17:25.830 --> 17:28.370]  Um, it's the opposite of the way publishing works generally.
[17:28.850 --> 17:34.090]  Generally, people in publishing cost out how much an author is gonna make through the entire life of the book, right?
[17:34.290 --> 17:34.410]  Mm-hmm.
[17:34.410 --> 17:35.690]  And then that's your advance.
[17:35.970 --> 17:39.390]  And that's as much as you can ever really expect to be paid by the publisher.
[17:39.670 --> 17:42.670]  And they don't even really keep good records at the end of the day.
[17:42.690 --> 17:43.770]  So, that's it.
[17:43.810 --> 17:50.310]  You get a giant lump sum at the beginning, and then the publisher goes about trying to meet that, you know, level eventually.
[17:50.910 --> 17:52.630]  Um, maybe telling you about it or not.
[17:52.630 --> 17:58.970]  But we pay small advances, and then, you know, our authors generally earn those advances back pretty fast, and then we just pay royalties.
[17:59.210 --> 18:03.810]  And that's easier, and it keeps the author interested, and it's more fun.
[18:04.030 --> 18:04.770]  We're kind of...
[18:04.770 --> 18:06.750]  Sometimes it's a lot of work for Jean, who does the work.
[18:06.910 --> 18:09.810]  But I think she enjoys, like, seeing that.
[18:09.810 --> 18:10.810]  I enjoy accounting.
[18:11.550 --> 18:12.090]  Yeah, yeah.
[18:12.770 --> 18:13.450]  That's true.
[18:13.830 --> 18:13.930]  Okay.
[18:14.210 --> 18:16.790]  So, what is that editorial program?
[18:16.950 --> 18:17.970]  Let me quickly go back to it.
[18:18.290 --> 18:28.790]  Any of our books have to be one of these three things, at least, which is digital experiments, work by trans people, like trans literature is something that's very important to me as part of the program, right?
[18:28.990 --> 18:31.150]  And then fiction for the troubled.
[18:32.390 --> 18:34.730]  A book has to be at least one of these three.
[18:35.410 --> 18:37.450]  And ideally, it is more than one of these three.
[18:37.670 --> 18:40.930]  Ideally, at least two, to be a really good in-star title.
[18:43.430 --> 18:46.970]  As you can see, we do fantastically well at it.
[18:47.730 --> 18:50.850]  It's really funny, because this check came in while I was preparing the presentation.
[18:51.030 --> 18:55.430]  This is our quarterly distribution check for netting out $586, right?
[18:55.810 --> 18:58.830]  And we had, like, opposite reactions to, like, this check.
[18:59.950 --> 19:02.970]  I don't think this is a very good check for a quarter of work.
[19:03.890 --> 19:04.430]  Oh, boy.
[19:04.670 --> 19:06.530]  $500 in profit just to us.
[19:06.630 --> 19:06.850]  Amazing.
[19:07.410 --> 19:09.070]  Yeah, it's mostly to the authors, though.
[19:09.670 --> 19:11.030]  It's not really mostly to us.
[19:12.630 --> 19:13.690]  But as you can...
[19:13.690 --> 19:18.390]  I included the slide in part because it was just funny that I got this while I'm, like, feeling very optimistic about this model.
[19:18.530 --> 19:19.810]  It's like, oh, yeah, this is the reality part.
[19:19.890 --> 19:26.810]  But also that, like, if you choose to do this, it is important to remember that, like, although we have, and I'm very proud to say, have never run in the red.
[19:27.250 --> 19:28.450]  Like, I think there's never...
[19:28.450 --> 19:32.810]  Maybe, like, at the very beginning, there have been a couple quarters where we've run in the red, like, right at the start.
[19:33.070 --> 19:34.030]  But otherwise, no.
[19:34.530 --> 19:36.810]  And I think that is the beauty of this model.
[19:36.890 --> 19:44.550]  And if you are able to spare the labor to do it, which is the difficulty now, because we're not paying ourselves in cash, we have to have other jobs.
[19:44.550 --> 19:46.990]  And that limits the amount of actual throughput we can do.
[19:47.070 --> 19:50.610]  I don't want to sugarcoat that as being, like, but it's great, because it's really not great.
[19:50.610 --> 19:52.450]  I would like to be doing more books than we're doing, right?
[19:54.690 --> 20:07.330]  But you can make this work and have the business be self-sustaining without sucking money away from your life, is sort of the thing I want to express, if you're seeking this.
[20:07.430 --> 20:21.930]  This is, like, if you're seeking stories that are not being represented elsewhere, like some of our books about the twine scene, books by trans people, we have a brief period right now of being accepted by major publishers, but mostly have not been, have historically come out of,
[20:21.930 --> 20:23.550]  like, very small presses, right?
[20:24.030 --> 20:30.430]  They create this ferment, and they're, like, fiction books that we do that just, like, people don't necessarily like masterworks.
[20:30.430 --> 20:38.130]  I think, like, I don't know, like, that's a really intense and strange duck that I'm very proud to have published, but it's also, like, a complicated book to publish, right?
[20:39.390 --> 20:52.390]  Everybody has their own editorial vision about what sorts of books should be in the world, like what sorts of devil tower people should make, and this is basically to say, like, you can do this if you're willing to make the sort of sacrifices of time to do it.
[20:52.470 --> 20:55.010]  It actually is not that hard to set it up and make it work.
[20:55.930 --> 21:11.110]  And we're happy to take questions from specific dreaming publishers at the end, but we would also like to tell you about our specific book that we're talking about, which is a current project called Remember the Internet, and a little bit about the history of this.
[21:12.830 --> 21:14.070]  This is the concept.
[21:15.510 --> 21:21.250]  As all good concepts, it is mathematically hard to achieve and vertiginous and exciting.
[21:21.510 --> 21:21.730]  Yeah.
[21:25.230 --> 21:27.370]  It fits the program in two ways.
[21:27.730 --> 21:29.250]  It is about a digital...
[21:29.250 --> 21:37.710]  It is deeply digital and focused about creating a full history of spaces, one at a time, as well as our personal relationships with these.
[21:37.710 --> 21:39.550]  Many of the authors are trans, right?
[21:39.750 --> 21:41.990]  So it ends up advancing the project of trans literature in ways.
[21:42.210 --> 21:43.610]  It is unfortunately non-fictional.
[21:44.610 --> 21:46.510]  Do you want to talk more about the genesis of this?
[21:46.590 --> 21:47.690]  Because this was really your idea.
[21:48.110 --> 21:54.250]  Oh, well, it was an idea that I think we both wanted to do forever in some way or another, just like it kind of fits both of our interests.
[21:55.310 --> 21:56.330]  I think I got it.
[21:56.330 --> 22:06.430]  I was inspired by it by watching how you think about and talk about the Internet, which is, you know, as this place that, you know, has a real role.
[22:07.650 --> 22:09.990]  I'm not even sure if I like the Internet at all.
[22:10.170 --> 22:12.750]  Like, I just got a phone like two years ago, so...
[22:13.570 --> 22:16.210]  But I love history.
[22:16.370 --> 22:19.410]  I'm a huge history fanatic, I'd say.
[22:20.090 --> 22:24.850]  But I was working for Orr Books, and I was working on this project.
[22:26.690 --> 22:28.550]  Everybody here knows The Well, right?
[22:28.670 --> 22:30.350]  Or is familiar with The Well.
[22:31.110 --> 22:34.470]  So this was the Whole Earth electronic link.
[22:34.790 --> 22:38.690]  It was an early sort of social media site.
[22:38.810 --> 22:39.370]  It still exists.
[22:39.470 --> 22:43.670]  I think Salon bought it, but it still exists in some form or another.
[22:43.670 --> 23:02.990]  And so, Kim Hostreiter, who runs Paper Magazine, you're used to, collected a bunch of message logs from The Well, surrounding the death of this guy, Tom Mandel, who worked for Time Warner.
[23:03.110 --> 23:04.390]  He was Time Warner's IT guy.
[23:04.630 --> 23:20.050]  And one day, in a message board, looking for advice about a flu he had, discovered that he had cancer, kind of in this message board chat, and then decided he wanted to be the first person to die, kind of, online.
[23:20.410 --> 23:23.110]  He's like, well, I don't have much time, so I guess this is it.
[23:23.190 --> 23:31.010]  I'm going to be a forever part of this new space, was the quote he said about the Internet and just, like, dying online publicly.
[23:31.330 --> 23:36.650]  So he invited anybody to come in and just, like, ask him what it was like to die of cancer or die in general.
[23:36.930 --> 23:39.050]  And he posted his thoughts in real time.
[23:39.050 --> 23:58.910]  And she collected all these and put them, you know, and then it was my job to, as an editorial assistant at Orr Books, to go through all these and get the rights from everybody that had responded for this 20-year-old, you know, message board.
[23:59.690 --> 24:02.170]  So I organized how best to do that.
[24:02.490 --> 24:06.810]  You know, I was frequently told, you know, to do these impossible projects, which I really enjoyed.
[24:07.030 --> 24:10.110]  But, so I was like, okay, so I thought about the best way to do this.
[24:10.270 --> 24:15.110]  And, you know, I decided it should definitely be an opt-in system rather than an opt-out system.
[24:15.170 --> 24:16.710]  Because I didn't want to accidentally publish somebody.
[24:16.790 --> 24:21.230]  I didn't want to pick this book up and see their, you know, shit in there from, you know, 20 years.
[24:21.490 --> 24:28.490]  This thing that they wrote idly to this guy, you know, in a moment of, like, very, you know, private sympathy.
[24:29.390 --> 24:31.130]  But we got, you know, his widow was involved.
[24:31.230 --> 24:31.910]  That was the first step.
[24:32.050 --> 24:36.010]  We, you know, talked, reached out to his widow and asked if she'd be okay with this.
[24:36.230 --> 24:41.490]  And then, yeah, I managed to track everybody down slowly through their, their handles.
[24:42.410 --> 24:44.890]  And we got, eventually reached a critical mass.
[24:45.050 --> 24:51.790]  We got enough people that you could tell the story, you know, even with illusions by leaving people out.
[24:51.790 --> 24:54.990]  And it was a satisfying piece of work.
[24:55.170 --> 24:57.310]  And I was just, I was so into this.
[24:57.410 --> 24:59.190]  And I thought it was, like, such a fun project.
[24:59.290 --> 25:06.050]  But it was such a, you know, impossible work of, you know, just like, how do, how are we going to tell these stories later?
[25:06.270 --> 25:10.770]  Like, there's, you know, people are living on the Internet like it's a real place.
[25:10.870 --> 25:11.750]  And it is.
[25:12.150 --> 25:17.950]  But we don't have the procedures in place for real historical, you know, work to be done.
[25:18.630 --> 25:25.110]  And people aren't expecting this to be, they don't think about it like a real place, like it was a battle or an event.
[25:25.350 --> 25:29.330]  So the journalism of it, the history of it is very hard to do.
[25:30.250 --> 25:36.970]  So then, you know, moving from this, you know, I just thought about all the other places that I'd want to memorialize or the stories I'd want to tell.
[25:37.670 --> 25:49.210]  And there's just infinite, there's just an amazing amount of things out there that have happened on the Internet that I think are worth chronicling and in a way that is personal and tells an interesting story.
[25:49.550 --> 25:56.950]  So that was, that was the birth of the Remember the Internet series was this book and or not wanting to do this series.
[25:56.950 --> 25:58.650]  Like, well, f*ck you, then I'll do it myself.
[26:00.090 --> 26:04.730]  Just the true draw of the no overhead publishing novels, you get to do that.
[26:05.730 --> 26:10.750]  There's also specific, why does it, why does this keep moving ahead when I don't want it to?
[26:11.570 --> 26:28.550]  There's also like, yeah, speaking to that, living in spaces, like there, there are people in this room that I met on the Internet when I was like a teenager in like game making forums and IRC chats that like, are not archived, like are not there, but are like rich social spaces full of people.
[26:29.230 --> 26:40.250]  That I remember knowing, like I'm writing a book right now that speaks to some of that and just not having the archival material to go back and look like things that I remember spaces I'd be in.
[26:40.310 --> 26:46.030]  Another way to think of this book is like, if you were to try to do a history of like neighborhoods, one book at a time, right?
[26:46.130 --> 26:53.230]  It's that level of like, we think of the Internet, we think of very small things sometimes, because we all experience it while sitting in front of a screen that seems very small.
[26:53.230 --> 27:00.990]  But it's actually like this completely vertiginous thing to think about all the experiences you've ever had and all the social circles that you've ever had on the Internet, and actually telling the story of that.
[27:01.470 --> 27:09.370]  It's like a Walter Benjamin's like arcades project, in some ways, where it's like famously unfinished work about 19th century streets in Paris.
[27:09.370 --> 27:21.390]  It's the Sadia Hartman book that just came out, if you read that, where she's doing like, it's like the history of like, liminal spaces in New York, like it's like, and it's stuff that isn't documented generally, like the stories she's telling are drawn from like,
[27:21.870 --> 27:27.910]  inferences from arrest records, like occasional like newspaper obituary columns and stuff and trying to imagine what the life of that would be.
[27:27.910 --> 27:36.370]  And trying to capture these sort of ephemeral things in passing, and also bring the sort of like rigorous historical element to it.
[27:36.490 --> 27:38.910]  Yeah, yeah, it's also important that it be personal.
[27:39.530 --> 27:57.890]  And, you know, I think there's this kind of feeling in the air that because everything's being recorded, and it's being preserved by a place like the Internet Archive, or, you know, a giant corporation that has all the data or whatever, you don't have to go in there and do the work of trying to figure out the content.
[27:57.890 --> 28:04.890]  And living in that world and, you know, but rebuilding it, like someone will do that way later, but that can't be done.
[28:05.110 --> 28:10.610]  Like, you know, in order to actually tell the story something, you have to have kind of gone through it and, you know, lived it.
[28:10.770 --> 28:22.550]  And it's, it's way better to be a personal history while we still have the time to do it while we're, you know, in a period where it's happening, so that people in the future will be able to get a better understanding of the actual like, physical feeling of,
[28:22.670 --> 28:31.930]  you know, being on MySpace, or the actual like, reason why you would have enjoyed Tumblr porn as distinct from other kinds of porn, you know?
[28:32.110 --> 28:32.350]  Yeah.
[28:33.510 --> 28:33.910]  So...
[28:33.910 --> 28:34.490]  Exactly.
[28:34.730 --> 28:37.190]  Like, the Internet Archive is creating like, the fossil record.
[28:37.730 --> 28:43.590]  And like, you could write a lot of history from a fossil record, but you can't write, like, there are things that no fossil record can preserve, right?
[28:43.590 --> 28:44.870]  Yeah, that's the perfect way to put it.
[28:45.250 --> 28:50.190]  So thinking about this, in terms of our, just in terms of like, that's why we wanted to do it kind of spiritually.
[28:50.810 --> 28:56.430]  In terms of the specific like, five jobs thing, if we can get the slide back or anything.
[28:57.330 --> 29:08.790]  We have, editorially, we have this sort of clear, in addition to the reasons that we would want to do this from an acquiring perspective, it actually makes it pretty easy for writers to do these, particularly once we've done the original things.
[29:08.790 --> 29:13.830]  The books tend to be very short, they tend to be very templated, and they tend to be pretty personally charged.
[29:14.750 --> 29:23.270]  As a rule, I think it's easier than not, if when somebody starts asking you questions about what a space was like, it's actually pretty easy to get a book that's sort of two-spec out of that.
[29:24.790 --> 29:28.070]  The production is also very, very scalable, because the books are templated.
[29:29.190 --> 29:33.450]  So it's sort of, we don't have to do a lot of front-end design work as we have to do with our other books.
[29:33.470 --> 29:35.850]  We could just sort of like, plug these in once we get a text.
[29:36.910 --> 29:39.910]  From a marketing perspective, bookstores tend to want series.
[29:40.150 --> 29:41.730]  The books tend to cross-sell one another.
[29:41.930 --> 29:45.510]  If you buy, like, volume two, you'll end up perhaps buying volume one and volume three.
[29:46.270 --> 29:52.110]  If you want stores to order book five and six, if they've already ordered books one, two, and three, that's kind of a gimme that they would add that on.
[29:52.670 --> 29:54.210]  And then the other way around as well.
[29:55.130 --> 29:58.590]  And from operations, it tends to make it profitable because of all the above.
[29:59.190 --> 30:05.030]  The disadvantage is publicity, because nobody necessarily wants to run reviews of, like, volume 42, if you remember the Internet.
[30:05.550 --> 30:09.410]  Like, you won't get press for that necessarily, unless it's about something that tends to be fascinating.
[30:09.690 --> 30:11.450]  This is kind of the business case for it.
[30:11.510 --> 30:17.250]  I think it's like, we have to remind ourselves for due diligence that there is a business case, because I think we just kind of want to do it, you know?
[30:18.230 --> 30:25.310]  But the fact that it's not only, like, a thing that should be done, but also something that I think is eminently doable to write this kind of history generally.
[30:25.670 --> 30:27.050]  Like, these are sort of the ways to do it.
[30:27.050 --> 30:33.490]  There are models in doing this, other than the books we already mentioned, are series like 33 and a third, if people are familiar with these books.
[30:33.690 --> 30:34.650]  Do people know about these books?
[30:34.810 --> 30:36.570]  Like, show of hands, 33 and a third?
[30:37.330 --> 30:38.230]  Yeah, they're just...
[30:38.230 --> 30:39.830]  The person I expected knows about these books.
[30:39.830 --> 30:47.190]  Yeah, they're just... they're individual books about an album, written by journalists or writers, fiction writers.
[30:47.350 --> 30:51.670]  They take one specific album and they write an entire book about their relationship with this album.
[30:53.610 --> 30:54.390]  Yeah, totally.
[30:54.650 --> 30:59.110]  And then, like, other series that exist like this, Boss Fight Books is sort of the same idea with old games.
[30:59.450 --> 31:06.770]  Like, people's personal experiences with things like Final Fantasy, there's one about ZZT, an old text mode game, Earthbound, etc.
[31:08.730 --> 31:12.370]  This one from Bloomsbury Publishing called Every... or Object Lessons.
[31:12.610 --> 31:15.230]  Rather, I keep thinking the title is Everyday Objects, and it is not.
[31:15.490 --> 31:18.950]  It is Object Lessons, which is why the title of the slide mismatches what's actually on it.
[31:19.750 --> 31:26.270]  But it's basically taking, like, fairly narrow topics and writing these sort of intense personal reflections about them.
[31:26.650 --> 31:28.530]  Sort of, like, one thing at a time.
[31:28.690 --> 31:31.750]  It's a similar, like, vertiginously complicated project to do.
[31:32.910 --> 31:34.370]  These series are all, like...
[31:34.370 --> 31:37.910]  You can go into almost any bookstore and just see, like, a big stack of these.
[31:38.030 --> 31:40.210]  There are, like, a hundred books in each of these series.
[31:40.470 --> 31:51.470]  And we sort of use these as a template, as you can see, in thinking of how our books were going to look, trying to have very simple designs that are very repeatable, but also sort of surprising in terms of what we do.
[31:51.710 --> 31:57.930]  You notice also that, like, our template changed as we did these, because, like, it makes me crazy that the text isn't lined up.
[31:58.050 --> 31:59.050]  But that's neither here nor there.
[32:00.230 --> 32:02.910]  And you can see we've physically done these books.
[32:02.910 --> 32:03.730]  They're right here.
[32:04.250 --> 32:06.110]  There's a fourth one as well that's forthcoming.
[32:07.350 --> 32:09.830]  The editorial process on this, I think, is worth talking about.
[32:10.190 --> 32:11.910]  Do you want to talk about working with Miles at all on this?
[32:11.910 --> 32:15.630]  Yeah, so Miles is one of the authors that I worked with at Orr.
[32:15.710 --> 32:17.150]  Does anybody here know Miles Klee?
[32:19.090 --> 32:23.690]  So he's the editor at Mel Magazine, which is an amazing magazine.
[32:23.690 --> 32:25.110]  I really recommend checking out Mel.
[32:25.350 --> 32:27.430]  I think they do really interesting work.
[32:27.610 --> 32:32.130]  It's like a combination of Gawker and Jezebel, but with, like...
[32:32.130 --> 32:35.850]  It's actually owned by Dollar Shave Club, or WAS.
[32:35.850 --> 32:37.850]  It was kind of their marketing apparatus.
[32:38.210 --> 32:41.010]  But then just kind of, like, spiraled out into its own thing.
[32:41.250 --> 32:44.270]  So much so that eventually Dollar Shave Club dropped them.
[32:44.490 --> 32:45.890]  It was like, you guys are...
[32:45.890 --> 32:50.510]  We can't in good conscience, like, fund this incredibly weird magazine anymore.
[32:51.210 --> 32:55.050]  And now they're free and on their own to do whatever they want.
[32:55.190 --> 32:56.470]  I really recommend checking them out.
[32:56.590 --> 32:57.510]  I think you'd like what they do.
[32:57.650 --> 33:03.730]  But Mel Magazine, you know, does a lot of long narratives of Internet history.
[33:04.510 --> 33:12.410]  You know, and so working with him was easier for us to find people that were already working in this space and who may have a longer story they wanted to tell.
[33:12.790 --> 33:14.370]  And that turned out to be totally the case.
[33:14.530 --> 33:18.330]  So we got two authors, at least, from Mel.
[33:19.950 --> 33:23.590]  And Miles was originally kind of the editor behind the scenes of this project.
[33:24.590 --> 33:32.690]  Yeah, and sort of Miles bowed out at some point just because I think around the time the pandemic started, everyone just had to sort of think about priorities.
[33:33.010 --> 33:35.610]  And, you know, it did take us a long time to do these books.
[33:35.790 --> 33:38.850]  We sort of lost a year in the middle of that, just not being able to work on them.
[33:39.890 --> 33:43.470]  But basically we wanted to make sure that the book hit this balance...
[33:44.330 --> 33:45.750]  I'm going to skip ahead a little bit.
[33:45.890 --> 33:46.270]  No, I'm not.
[33:47.150 --> 33:51.470]  We wanted to make sure this book hit this balance between history and memory, that we'll talk about a little further.
[33:51.470 --> 33:56.930]  So we're working with people who have strong personal writing chops and also journalistic cred.
[33:57.870 --> 34:00.490]  It's kind of the balance of what we're looking for.
[34:02.230 --> 34:03.930]  So we did a Kickstarter for this.
[34:04.150 --> 34:15.150]  I wanted to include this both in part because it shows this cool graphic we did of this book, including the fourth one that's still forthcoming, but also to draw your attention to how this is actually not a lot of money to publish four books.
[34:17.630 --> 34:21.450]  And this is sort of why we're speaking to like the no overhead model being pretty effective.
[34:23.050 --> 34:28.310]  Like just to think that this is not something it was like we had to like draw this like massive Kickstarter into all this thing.
[34:28.430 --> 34:32.130]  It's like it's actually pretty simple to do if you have a project like this brewing.
[34:32.710 --> 34:34.990]  Yes, we had 10 grand to work with at the beginning.
[34:35.150 --> 34:39.570]  And we also had an audience, you know, that was interested in it from the outset, which is useful.
[34:39.790 --> 34:41.710]  We know how many to print, et cetera.
[34:42.550 --> 34:43.330]  Yes, we did.
[34:43.630 --> 34:46.890]  I want to include this just to show that this got some early good press.
[34:47.090 --> 34:53.210]  Like this is an article from the Atlantic that I'm no longer paywalled out of because I don't subscribe to the Atlantic, but it is pretty cool.
[34:53.410 --> 34:54.630]  You should check it out if you would like.
[34:56.410 --> 34:59.110]  This is history and memory being sort of the themes of the book.
[34:59.210 --> 35:00.510]  I want to make sure we have time for questions.
[35:00.610 --> 35:01.170]  We do, we do.
[35:01.750 --> 35:02.070]  Okay.
[35:03.870 --> 35:08.830]  History is being sort of the journalistic, like hard history, like Robert Caro's stuff that you're talking about.
[35:08.830 --> 35:11.370]  This is from, do you want to talk about Google Glass, I guess?
[35:11.590 --> 35:11.770]  Yes.
[35:12.130 --> 35:15.570]  So we, the Google Glass book that we, that just came out, just came out.
[35:15.790 --> 35:20.470]  It's not actually, you know, out yet technically, but it's available for sale here.
[35:21.070 --> 35:25.350]  But it's a, it's a really exhaustive on the record account of Google Glass.
[35:25.610 --> 35:32.890]  It's rise and fall, the reasons for its failure, its resurrection as an enterprise product.
[35:33.390 --> 35:37.070]  And we got everybody on the record who is a developer at Google Glass.
[35:37.370 --> 35:39.830]  And so, you know, and we checked all the sources.
[35:40.050 --> 35:44.910]  It's just a work of, of pure journalism and storytelling about this product.
[35:46.370 --> 35:48.110]  And that's basically all there is to say.
[35:48.190 --> 35:52.530]  I mean, you know, if that's something you'd like to read, this is the book, the definitive book about it.
[35:52.670 --> 35:54.530]  I doubt they will do this again.
[35:55.190 --> 35:59.550]  They pointed, you know, they pointed fingers at who they thought were the villains for it failing.
[36:00.350 --> 36:09.830]  And they're all sort of, you know, thinking about the next, you know, a lot of them are no longer with Google or on product projects like this anymore.
[36:10.090 --> 36:19.650]  But they are still thinking about, this was their passion, you know, trying to create an AR device that, that was portable and scalable and, you know, theoretically affordable.
[36:21.470 --> 36:24.110]  But, you know, that was, that was something they weren't able to achieve.
[36:24.290 --> 36:26.550]  But I think every single one of them wishes they could do it again.
[36:27.290 --> 36:32.090]  And so this is, this is kind of the book for, you know, memorializing their projects.
[36:33.570 --> 36:42.570]  Yeah, and you can see from this, this quote here is like, just part of the reason why, like getting into some of these engineers theories about why Google Glass failed.
[36:42.570 --> 36:49.830]  Like with this account of this hackathon that had no clear criteria whatsoever, other than like, use this product to make something spectacular and new.
[36:51.630 --> 36:55.690]  It's kind of like interesting, like the level of like granularity into the, into the rooms they're looking at.
[36:55.970 --> 36:58.610]  So it's sort of like strong on the history side of the continuum.
[36:59.530 --> 37:10.250]  And we have sort of this hybrid with Anna's, Anna Valence's Tumblr porn, which is a mix of like, it ended up becoming, I think this book started before the Tumblr ban was even announced.
[37:10.250 --> 37:17.490]  And it was sort of happening, like we, we had to very quickly add a last chapter to this book to account for that, in my memory.
[37:19.030 --> 37:20.870]  But, oh no, you can't read it anymore.
[37:21.710 --> 37:25.230]  But the, basically, and I can't read it either.
[37:25.570 --> 37:25.850]  Thank you.
[37:26.790 --> 37:33.030]  Basically talking about it, the architecture of Tumblr is leading to the creation of like, intense discourse communities.
[37:33.790 --> 37:41.190]  Because of the way the tag system worked on the level of that, as well as giving a blow-by-blow account of the porn ban coming down in the legal sides of it.
[37:41.750 --> 37:51.270]  Along with like, Anna's story of just growing up online, coming to like, experience online porn, discovering things about herself and her identity through it.
[37:51.270 --> 37:55.950]  And then becoming like, involved in these communities as like, both like, consumer and practitioner.
[37:56.530 --> 38:00.550]  Coupled with the history of the technology and the scene that it created as a function of the technology.
[38:00.970 --> 38:03.190]  So it's sort of a combination of like, history and memory.
[38:03.590 --> 38:12.630]  Yeah, and then the government's crackdown with SESTA-FOSTA legislation leading directly to the, to the destruction of Tumblr itself when they got rid of their porn.
[38:12.630 --> 38:13.310]  Yeah.
[38:14.050 --> 38:14.470]  Yeah.
[38:14.470 --> 38:14.750]  Still sad.
[38:15.490 --> 38:16.910]  There's no reason to use Tumblr anymore.
[38:17.650 --> 38:18.070]  Okay.
[38:18.350 --> 38:23.410]  A preview of things to come, which is our fourth book, MySpace Scenes Queens by Noor El-Sabai.
[38:23.630 --> 38:29.570]  In this section, this is moving toward the personal memoir, personal experience of what it is like to use this technology.
[38:29.850 --> 38:43.130]  In this passage, Noor is talking about, beyond talking about their personal history with MySpace, a history of relationships, a history of like, being a teenager on MySpace, and coming to understand oneself and one's power to move through the world through that.
[38:43.770 --> 38:48.490]  I'm talking specifically at this point about being in Lebanon during the course of a bombing of a marina.
[38:49.030 --> 38:55.890]  And just like, the instincts to then take that experience of sort of horror and trauma and immediately post about it on MySpace and watch the reaction coming back in.
[38:56.150 --> 38:58.590]  And that moment of discovering that you can do that.
[38:58.970 --> 39:07.090]  The loop of what it, the loop between online, the real world, and like, your sort of like, inner horror world, being sort of a compelling thing to narrate.
[39:07.090 --> 39:11.730]  That book is coming out as soon as I finish editing it because we don't have a lot of labor time.
[39:13.050 --> 39:28.830]  And a sort of hybrid of both, I think, is Megan Milks' Tori Amos bootleg web ring, which is very much about tape trading scenes in the Tori Amos bootleg tape trading scene online on USENET and Listservs in the late 1990s.
[39:29.410 --> 39:32.290]  And like, web rings is sort of a way of connecting people to one another.
[39:32.510 --> 39:47.710]  In this passage, Megan is sort of combining all at once the exposure to Tori Amos bootlegs, realizing that there's more music than you can hear on the radio, find in a story thing, finding that the world is sort of deeper with this vast amount of information that's coming at you with the Internet,
[39:47.870 --> 39:52.690]  that people are being exposed to kind of for the first time around now, like 1996, 1997.
[39:54.330 --> 40:01.490]  Learning how to swim in that world with these rules for tape trading that you could do, like setting up like two-in-ones, blanks and postage, et cetera.
[40:01.750 --> 40:07.350]  And then also the drama of like, what will Chris think about my HTML tape trading website?
[40:12.290 --> 40:13.210]  What is ahead?
[40:15.390 --> 40:17.190]  So we have to finish season one.
[40:17.390 --> 40:26.350]  As we've mentioned, COVID, needing day jobs and things have set us behind our schedule, but we are very, very close to getting the fourth book out, and the third book is sort of imminently available.
[40:26.470 --> 40:27.470]  We are selling it today.
[40:29.630 --> 40:31.350]  Season two is coming very quickly.
[40:31.730 --> 40:33.390]  We would like to scale it to six books.
[40:33.490 --> 40:37.570]  We would like to do a decreased temp, but we do have to solve the problem of day jobs and the problem of capacity.
[40:38.810 --> 40:41.190]  But I would like to expand the series pretty substantially.
[40:41.190 --> 40:45.910]  We now have the season one books as references for writers, which I think will make this pretty effective.
[40:46.490 --> 40:48.930]  And then trying to identify holes in our coverage of season one.
[40:49.430 --> 40:52.810]  We have this from our Kickstarter backers about some...
[40:52.810 --> 40:59.710]  This is a very, very small section of a very large spreadsheet from our backers about what topics they would like to see in season two.
[41:00.630 --> 41:09.150]  We've looked at some of these cats, cybersex generally, Susan's Place, Racefield 2009, I did not know about until I looked at this on the spreadsheet.
[41:09.390 --> 41:14.010]  And like, Neopets was actually one of the most common ones, so we will almost certainly do a book about Neopets, I think.
[41:14.010 --> 41:16.230]  Get ready for Neopets the book, I guess.
[41:16.570 --> 41:16.710]  Yeah.
[41:17.150 --> 41:20.010]  As you can see, we have our Miro board where we plan these things.
[41:20.230 --> 41:23.130]  A book on Neopets is prominently featured, but some other things...
[41:23.130 --> 41:26.710]  I've tried to censor this in terms of who we're thinking of approaching for some of these things.
[41:27.390 --> 41:31.230]  But one of the groups we're thinking of approaching is you.
[41:32.250 --> 41:36.450]  If you would like to pitch us a book, please do so via this Google form.
[41:37.350 --> 41:38.570]  Take a photo of this.
[41:38.970 --> 41:41.750]  It is tinyurl.com slash New Hope RTI.
[41:42.110 --> 41:44.910]  We are very, very interested in your personal memories of the Internet.
[41:45.210 --> 41:47.690]  People at this conference, I think, would be sort of like uniquely...
[41:47.690 --> 41:48.950]  I would be interested in hearing from.
[41:51.710 --> 41:54.650]  Please send us your thoughts on this topic at this forum.
[41:54.830 --> 41:56.770]  And I think we have some time for questions.
[41:56.770 --> 42:01.870]  And we would like to hear, if you would like to advance pitch books to us, please do so now.
[42:09.770 --> 42:14.650]  The thing about the Q&A period is someone has to be brave and be the first person to ask a question.
[42:15.270 --> 42:16.450]  Who's that going to be?
[42:23.100 --> 42:24.100]  Yeah, we'll just share.
[42:31.810 --> 42:33.470]  Hey, quick question.
[42:33.790 --> 42:35.570]  So you had the three requirements.
[42:35.890 --> 42:38.470]  The first one said digital experiments.
[42:38.630 --> 42:40.510]  What does that mean?
[42:42.950 --> 42:45.850]  Yeah, so we've done some really interesting stuff.
[42:46.190 --> 42:49.210]  We published the Every Word Twitter bot as a book.
[42:49.750 --> 42:51.410]  Does anybody here know Every Word?
[42:52.150 --> 42:56.030]  It was a Twitter bot that just published every word in the English language.
[42:56.210 --> 42:56.530]  That's it.
[42:57.310 --> 42:57.530]  It was...
[42:57.530 --> 42:58.970]  2007 to 2014.
[42:59.330 --> 42:59.490]  Yeah.
[43:00.890 --> 43:03.050]  It was created by Alison Parrish.
[43:03.470 --> 43:11.970]  And it's an amazing document because it tells you how many likes each word got, right?
[43:11.970 --> 43:21.210]  So we published that, you know, each word and the amount of likes that it received in order of, you know, it's indexable both ways.
[43:22.390 --> 43:27.830]  I believe the words that got the most likes were jet fuel does not melt still beams.
[43:27.830 --> 43:28.530]  No, that was...
[43:28.530 --> 43:29.210]  That's different.
[43:29.470 --> 43:29.970]  That was...
[43:29.970 --> 43:31.690]  The data was distorted by...
[43:31.690 --> 43:32.250]  There was a...
[43:32.690 --> 43:39.270]  There's a website that let you write sentences using Every Word by retweeting Every Word tweets in the order of the sentence you wanted to make.
[43:39.350 --> 43:41.910]  And a bunch of people spammed it with jet fuel does not melt steam beams.
[43:41.910 --> 43:43.690]  So the count is...
[43:43.690 --> 43:50.070]  The interesting thing about the book is it is the count of favorites and retweets as of like a specific day in 2015.
[43:50.970 --> 43:55.070]  So we haven't done a print edition of this book yet because it's very daunting.
[43:55.250 --> 44:01.710]  It's about 2,000 pages physically and we have been hung up on by publishers of legal textbooks and things.
[44:01.830 --> 44:09.670]  We will do this book eventually, but it's an increasingly strange reference work because it's like now if we published it tomorrow, we don't have new data.
[44:09.670 --> 44:11.150]  It's going to be seven years old.
[44:11.350 --> 44:12.390]  Every Word results.
[44:12.590 --> 44:13.130]  Like it's...
[44:13.130 --> 44:15.790]  Even before Twitter switched to likes, it's important that it's still favorites.
[44:17.050 --> 44:17.530]  Which...
[44:18.790 --> 44:19.270]  Yes.
[44:19.890 --> 44:22.210]  Other digital books I guess we've done or...
[44:22.210 --> 44:22.850]  Hot writing.
[44:22.850 --> 44:22.970]  Hot writing.
[44:23.190 --> 44:23.290]  Yeah.
[44:23.430 --> 44:24.170]  Do you want to talk about hot writing?
[44:24.270 --> 44:24.510]  Yeah.
[44:24.790 --> 44:27.250]  So we did a book called Hot Writing, which is a...
[44:27.250 --> 44:46.010]  It's a platform that this code poet and digital artist and just all around sort of brilliant guy Todd Anderson did, where he created this system for being able to perform writing online in a, you know, space like this.
[44:46.030 --> 44:48.690]  Or he had a mobile laptop like Nathan Fielder's got.
[44:49.310 --> 45:00.690]  And, you know, he'd do some, you know, code poetry that he'd write and then perform using keystrokes to match up beats.
[45:01.670 --> 45:06.290]  Anyway, we published some of his, you know, most famous code poems as a book.
[45:08.830 --> 45:10.050]  Only a digital book.
[45:10.310 --> 45:13.750]  And, you know, they're playable so you can play them on your browser as well.
[45:15.210 --> 45:18.330]  Yeah, the only a digital book is complicated because like we...
[45:19.730 --> 45:28.290]  A lot of I think the principle behind digital experiments is sometimes books where the print book and the e-book are going to have a lot of variance between them.
[45:28.290 --> 45:32.910]  And often where the e-book is more interesting than the print book by a great deal.
[45:33.070 --> 45:36.890]  Like one of the, one of the books we did is that we do have here is video games for humans.
[45:37.490 --> 45:50.310]  Where the e-book is the same book distributed with all these games that you can go and explore, but also with 30 Twine games, which people are not familiar are HTML based choose your own adventure type games.
[45:50.310 --> 45:56.250]  They can get more, more complicated than that, but it's basically like a way to automate hyperlinking out a choose your own adventure logic.
[45:57.330 --> 45:58.870]  That's really, really accessible.
[45:59.090 --> 46:03.270]  So a lot of the creators on this tended to be marginalized people, trans people, like queer people generally.
[46:04.170 --> 46:09.490]  We got 30 people to play these games and sort of give their playthrough of them.
[46:09.490 --> 46:14.470]  So it's like catching the butterfly and then pinning it in a box so that everyone can appreciate it.
[46:14.590 --> 46:17.610]  But it's not flying anymore, right, in the print book and it is in the e-book.
[46:17.890 --> 46:21.990]  And I think that's sort of like an interesting thing about like, how do you solve that problem as a publisher?
[46:22.070 --> 46:26.870]  And like, how much distinction between the digital and print version can you tolerate?
[46:27.130 --> 46:29.770]  And we are interested in that question as one of our primary goals.
[46:32.090 --> 46:32.810]  Distress tolerance.
[46:33.890 --> 46:34.870]  Who has more questions?
[46:35.130 --> 46:37.110]  Who wants to tell us about an Internet space they love?
[46:37.210 --> 46:37.870]  We have some time.
[46:42.460 --> 46:43.260]  Yeah, cool.
[46:43.580 --> 46:47.100]  So you mentioned a bunch of other places that you've worked for.
[46:47.300 --> 46:50.560]  And some of them were labeled printers and some were labeled publishers.
[46:50.820 --> 46:54.360]  Are there like differences between these sometimes, always?
[46:56.540 --> 47:03.860]  Yeah, like printers tend to be just the people who physically like manufacture the books.
[47:04.160 --> 47:14.140]  Like they tend to be fairly large factories that deal with like things like how do printing machines handle overruns or things like how do you solve problems of like extremely short run printing or like things like the espresso book machine.
[47:14.440 --> 47:16.400]  Whereas publishers are really the ones who are...
[47:16.400 --> 47:19.860]  That's like one of the jobs is to contract with the printers to manufacture the books.
[47:20.420 --> 47:24.740]  But it's really about doing the thing like you're manufacturing the social...
[47:24.740 --> 47:25.980]  This is a horrible way to describe this.
[47:26.100 --> 47:29.420]  Like you're manufacturing the social reception of someone's work.
[47:30.760 --> 47:32.600]  Is like the difference between printing and publishing.
[47:33.040 --> 47:33.700]  If that answers the question.
[47:34.980 --> 47:35.420]  Cool.
[47:36.600 --> 47:37.260]  Other questions.
[47:37.460 --> 47:39.220]  Tell us about spaces you like.
[47:39.460 --> 47:40.280]  Tell us about the Internet.
[47:42.860 --> 47:43.300]  Yay.
[47:44.540 --> 47:44.980]  Right?
[47:45.100 --> 47:45.900]  Let's hear it for the Internet.
[47:46.200 --> 47:47.140]  Like do people wanna...
[47:47.140 --> 47:51.280]  So this is actually a question more for people who may be watching live or online.
[47:51.280 --> 47:57.680]  But in terms of Internet experiences and communities you're soliciting information on, what qualifies as the Internet?
[47:57.940 --> 47:58.020]  Right?
[47:58.160 --> 48:14.660]  Because we've sort of had some interesting talks at the con about things like the demo scene with like bootleg parties, with piracy for games, or like, you know, BBSs, which if you're dialing directly into one another's machines, like, arguably are non-Internet spaces.
[48:14.940 --> 48:17.820]  And yeah, so I'm interested to hear more about your criteria.
[48:17.820 --> 48:21.880]  Yeah, I would define the Internet as anything that isn't like a grim dive bar.
[48:22.940 --> 48:24.560]  Which is what I prefer.
[48:26.640 --> 48:29.000]  Yeah, like... Park is the Internet these days, yes.
[48:29.420 --> 48:31.200]  Thanks to Pokemon Go or whatever.
[48:31.640 --> 48:31.900]  But yeah.
[48:34.020 --> 48:38.880]  Yeah, I think like having a really, a big tent approach to what is the Internet.
[48:39.040 --> 48:44.600]  Like I think it would actually be very, very interesting to do a book that tries to approach something that would be like the base case of the Internet.
[48:45.900 --> 48:54.260]  Like I saw an excellent presentation here on Friday about quantum computing and talking about telnetting, like PDP 11s, and like telnetting in to servers.
[48:54.480 --> 48:58.220]  I think like things like, what was it like in the library where you had access to a telnet terminal?
[48:58.480 --> 49:01.780]  That's sort of very, very like the Internet, but the social space might not be very much.
[49:01.780 --> 49:08.800]  I think like, finding those edge cases would be interesting to do a book in and of itself.
[49:08.980 --> 49:14.240]  Even if there's like, even if the definition of what the Internet is maybe has to stretch or expand to accommodate it.
[49:15.740 --> 49:17.000]  An excellent question.
[49:19.540 --> 49:20.440]  Other questions?
[49:20.800 --> 49:20.940]  Yeah.
[49:22.340 --> 49:26.260]  Just to build on top of that, maybe that's an idea for the book itself.
[49:26.440 --> 49:30.320]  Like just spaces that are isolated Internet spots.
[49:30.840 --> 49:43.360]  Because, so we have like, so we, like VVS's are isolated, like pirate boxes and library boxes are isolated nodes where you physically have to travel somewhere to connect to them.
[49:43.360 --> 50:06.640]  And then on the other, on the flip side of that are the overlay networks like Tor and like chaos VPN and other ones were basically, or actually now VVS's over telnet and SSH where they're not a network, but they're not easily accessible, but they're accessible through hoops.
[50:06.640 --> 50:16.920]  And like just, it's fascinating how the topology of the Internet and Internet-like things, or Internet-esque things, whatever, has expanded in like the past 30 years.
[50:19.200 --> 50:34.820]  Yeah, I think kind of like tide pool, tide pool instances of the Internet or these overlays would actually be, that reminds me of the book you did with Oran, like gay propaganda, that was like physically, I think, smuggled into Russia at a time where you couldn't legally distribute like gay propaganda,
[50:34.820 --> 50:37.720]  meaning like any mention of LGBT people.
[50:38.160 --> 50:40.660]  Like it was smuggled in like on a mesh router, right?
[50:40.800 --> 50:54.400]  And it's basically like you could connect at the Olympics, that year, the Sochi Olympics, like, you could connect to this router that would give you the book in ways that it's like this very, very isolated node at the Internet, but that would actually be kind of a fascinating history of even though it's not connected to the old.
[50:54.480 --> 50:55.640]  Is that a mischaracterization of the book?
[50:55.700 --> 50:56.860]  No, that's right.
[50:56.920 --> 50:58.160]  It was actually steganography.
[50:58.160 --> 51:06.420]  We put the book inside an image, and then the image would automatically download onto your computer whether you wanted it or not, if you connected to this router essentially.
[51:07.260 --> 51:11.220]  To make everyone complicit in having gay propaganda at the Sochi Olympics.
[51:11.620 --> 51:11.740]  Yeah.
[51:12.420 --> 51:16.380]  It was a picture of a Sochi Olympics medal, I believe.
[51:18.300 --> 51:19.060]  That's wonderful.
[51:19.480 --> 51:20.280]  I didn't know that.
[51:20.980 --> 51:24.760]  But yeah, I think like those are actually some of the most interesting histories of the Internet.
[51:24.760 --> 51:27.640]  We're in the same way like a history of like, what is that island?
[51:27.860 --> 51:32.420]  Like my, the island that was like the lost culture, like the Minoan culture in Greece?
[51:32.920 --> 51:35.760]  The one where we don't, like it's Crete maybe, or like...
[51:36.260 --> 51:36.620]  Myconia.
[51:37.600 --> 51:38.180]  Myconia, yeah.
[51:38.360 --> 51:38.920]  Who said that?
[51:39.260 --> 51:40.420]  Who's all about Myconia here?
[51:41.080 --> 51:41.440]  Yay.
[51:41.760 --> 51:41.960]  Okay.
[51:43.240 --> 51:46.720]  Basically, yeah, like those, those histories are almost like the most interesting.
[51:46.860 --> 51:50.900]  The ones that sort of like speciate because of physical distance, I think would be really fascinating.
[51:52.600 --> 51:52.960]  Hi.
[51:53.060 --> 51:53.540]  Do you have a question?
[51:54.860 --> 51:56.760]  Do we have a mic for this question or...
[51:58.020 --> 51:59.520]  Oh, we have to...
[51:59.520 --> 52:00.700]  Can we ask one more real fast?
[52:01.460 --> 52:05.460]  You can ask us.
[52:05.460 --> 52:06.440]  You can ask us outside.
[52:06.700 --> 52:09.200]  Thank you very much.
[52:09.300 --> 52:10.600]  We have to, we have to cut for time.
[52:11.420 --> 52:13.200]  I really appreciate everybody coming here.
[52:13.580 --> 52:14.380]  Thank you so much.